2025-10-20
8 分钟Happy Monday listeners!
For Scientific American Science Quickly, I'm Rachel Feldman.
Let's kick off the week with a quick roundup of some of the latest science news.
Last Monday,
the World Health Organization warned that drug-resistant bacterial infections are on the rise around the globe.
According to the WHO, superbugs that are antimicrobial resistant, or AMR,
contributed to almost 5 million deaths in 2019 and bore direct responsibility for more than 1 million.
By 2023, the WHO reported,
one in six laboratory-confirmed bacterial infections showed resistance to antibiotics,
with upwards of 40% of the medications commonly used in these cases having lost effectiveness over the five years prior.
Low and middle income countries were more likely to be experiencing antibiotic resistance,
according to the New York Times.
And in fact, the situation could be worse than it appears.
The WHO noted that just 48% of countries actually shared data on antimicrobial resistance,
and of those, roughly half had lacking tracking systems.
The agency says that improving surveillance over the coming years will be crucial in the fight against superbugs.
Zooming in on some more localized public health news and some much bigger bugs,
New York officials confirmed last Tuesday that a Long Island resident had tested positive for the chicken guña virus.
The infected individual who lives in Nassau County had reportedly traveled out of the county but not internationally before acquiring the mosquito-borne illness,
making this the first reported transmission to occur within the US since 2019.